Previous studies have noted the importance of individual attributes, job-related characteristics, pension eligibility, and health in discriminating retired workers from those remaining active in the labor force. The majority of these factors relate most directly to the shaping of the retirement status as destination status or to aspects of voluntarism in the timing of labor force withdrawal. However, retirement implies an origin status as well, and it is likely that the characteristics of the particular job the worker retires from influence his retirement behavior. Considering particular measures of job-content is clearly preferable to relying on occupational categories as proxies for multidimensional job differences. The proposed research will merge individual-level information from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Older Men with job-content infomation from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Use of the additional job information available in the DOT will allow an assessment of the kinds of work activities and conditions that encourage continued employment among older workers as well as the activities and conditions that seem to promote early retirement, net of the retirement-relevant factors already established in the empirical literature. Information from the 1971, 1973, 1976, 1978 and 1981 waves will be analyzed. Using a multiple-category framework that incorporates information on labor-force status and worker differences in labor supply, binary logit and multinomial logit models will be estimated to assess the net effects of job properties on retirement status, on changes in the labor force status of older workers, on health status, on health improvement and health deterioration, on self-employment status, and on mobility between wage-and-salary and self-employment statuses. Lisrel V will be used to estimate longitudinal models of retirement. These models will allow greater complexity in the network of relationships among independent and dependent variables and, as required, adjust for violations in the assumptions made regarding errors in variables.